German Adjectives Research Articles

Метафоризация детерминативных глагольных композитов с параметрическими компонентами “hoch” и “nieder” в немецком языке

This paper deals with a study of the metaphorical meanings represented by complex verbal phrases with a definitional component of a parametric adjective. The research aims to reveal the associative and imaginative properties of parametric adjectives, on the basis of which metaphorical transfers are formed. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that spatial properties of German adjectives “hoch” and “nieder” are considered for the first time through the prism of figurative perception of space. This inspires us to broaden our knowledge not only about the nominal aspects of these phrases but also how the size attributes of material objects are being restructured in the mindset of a human and how certain abstract phenomena and notions are cognized in a parametric plan. The study detected that the parametric adjectives in the analyzed composite verbs vary largely with the degree of their semantic metaphorization. The core of the imagery of these units contains the re-conceptualization (re-thinking) of spatial relations, which leads to the appearance of new properties and attributes of imagination used to nominate non-spatial sense categories.

Вариативность средств выражения отрицания (на материале немецких прилагательных)

The expression of the category of negation in the system of the German adjective has not yet received a sufficiently complete description, although many researchers have repeatedly addressed this issue. One of the unsolved problems remains the problem of the speaker’s choice of a linguistic means of negation. The aim of the study is to identify the reasons for the variation of the means of negation in the class of German adjectives. The subject of consideration is represented by the ways that the negative meaning of adjectives is expressed. The main provisions concerning the essence and specifics of how the stems of adjectives are combined with negative affixes are touched upon. The variety of negative characteristics is seen as a peculiarity of the adjective from the perspective of the expression of a negative property or the absence of something. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the variability of the means of negative expression by adjectives is considered as an object of a synchronous structural analysis of linguistic units and is investigated taking into account the following linguistic levels: word-formation, structural-typological, syntactic and semantic. As a result of the study, it has been found that, in general, only a small number of factors are crucial when choosing a certain negation variant. In most cases, the prefix ‘un-’ is used to negate adjectives, regardless of the factors considered.

Approximation and comparison in word-formation: The case of denominal adjectives in Dutch, German, and English

The paper presents a corpus-based comparative study of denominal adjectives in Dutch, German, and English. It aims at clarifying the notion of approximation. More specifically, it focuses on investigating the relation between approximation and comparison as semantic categories in word-formation. Drawing on equivalent patterns, we study both the relation between comparative and approximative readings in various word-formation patterns (derivation and compounding) in Dutch, German, and English as well as the respective differences between the languages. We specifically focus on suffixes and other right head constituents (in particular Dutch -achtig, German -artig and -ähnlich, and English -like), thereby addressing the question whether word class changing morphology is at all suitable for expressing approximation. We conclude that the patterns investigated in our study may have approximative readings but are not approximative in the strict sense.

„Frische Brot, lecker Brot, taze Brot“ – Eigene Muster in der Adjektivverwendung auf einem mehrsprachigen Wochenmarkt

In this study, I am going to show that speakers at a multilingual urban street market in Berlin established own patterns for the use of attributive adjectives in German. Besides perfectly cano-nical patterns for adjectival inflection and linearization, the data contain instances where uninflected adjectives precede or follow the noun (normal Pide, ‘regular pita bread’; Weintrauben lecker, ‘grapes delicious’) or where adjectives are inflected with a reduction morpheme -e (türkische Mokka, ‘Turkish mocha’). I am showing that these patterns occur highly systematic. Concerning the question of what factors might have influenced the emergence of these patterns, I argue that speakers pick up typological and language-internal tendencies and apply these to new grammatical contexts. The linguistic diversity at the market as the site of these linguistic developments plays a central role for that.

On the Relationship between Frequency, Features, and Markedness in Inflection: Experimental Evidence from Russian Nouns

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as a way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness as a tool for capturing the structural distribution of inflectional affixes and predicting the behavioral consequences of that distribution. Based on evidence from German adjectives, Clahsen et al. argue that the number of specified features of inflectional affixes (which I argue represents a type of markedness) affects reaction times in lexical access. Affixes’ features, however, overlap with how frequently they occur. Clahsen et al. investigate only three affixes in German, leaving open questions about the relationship between the two factors and whether features are necessary as a predictor of lexical processing. In this paper, I use a larger set of inflectional affixes in Russian to test the relationship between affix features and affix frequency. I find that the two traits of affixes are correlated based on frequencies from a corpus and that in a lexical decision task, affix frequency is the better predictor of response times. My results suggest that we should question the necessity of featural markedness for explaining how inflectional structure is processed and, more generally, that both corpus and experimental data suggest a surprisingly close relationship between affix features and affix frequency.

Отадъективные глаголы эссивной семантики в немецком, английском и украинском языках в сопоставительном аспекте

The peculiarities of the semantics and structure of verbs derived from adjectives in German, English, and Ukrainian have been analyzed. The verbal lexemes of the languages compared can be defined by means of a semantic interpretation model “Subject of a Situation Is a Motivating Adjective”; they constitute a semantically heterogeneous group of “essive” verbs (from Lat. esse - ‘to be'). Within the framework of the derivational category of “essive” verbs at the level of derivational semantics subcategories, semantic groups and subgroups have been distinguished. In the semantic structure of “essive” deadjectival verbs of German, English, and Ukrainian, the opposition is reproduced on the basis of an “active/inactive state of the subject of a situation when revealing a feature denoted by a motivating adjective”. On this basis, the “essive” verbs of the compared languages are divided into two derivational subcategories: “proper essive” deadjectival verbs (inactive state of the subject of a situation when revealing a feature) and “quasi-essive” verbs derived from adjectives (active state of the subject when revealing a feature). In terms of interlingual comparison, the author notes the quantitative superiority of the two subcategories of the Ukrainian “active” deadjectival verbs over the corresponding subcategories of German and English, while within each language of comparison the quantitative ratios of the selected subcategories are different: in Ukrainian the subcategory of “proper essive” deadjectival verbs is superior over the subcategory of “quasi-essive” verbs, while in German and English the “quasi-essive” deadjectival verbs are quantitatively superior over the subcategory of “proper essive” deadjectival verbs (in German the quantitative difference is insignificant (nine verbs), and in English the group of “quasi-essive” deadjectival verbs is almost twice as big as in German). Within the selected derivational subcategories of the languages compared and on the basis of the presence/absence and nature of certain additional semantic components in the semantic structure of “essive” deadjectival verbs, semantic groups have been distinguished. Two semantic groups can be clearly distinguished within “proper essive” deadjectival verbs, depending on whether the feature revealed by the subject of a situation is necessarily visually perceptible (“expositive”) or visually imperceptible (“intra-essive”). The group of “expositive” deadjectival verbs of Ukrainian is eight times as big as the corresponding semantic group in German, while in English no deadjectival verbs of “expositive” semantics have been found. In German and English, the main way to derive essive verbs from adjectives is conversion (85% and 56%, respectively). In English, conversion is supplemented with suffix models (44%). Essive suffix deadjectival verbs make up 100% of the material in Ukrainian and 15% in German.

Modification of Qualia Structures Using Relative Adjectives in Lithuanian, Russian and German

Relative adjectives are immediate nominal explicators (nouns) that play a key role in meaningful structures in the Russian, Lithuanian, and German languages. This article investigates the semantic representation of a noun in an attribute group with relative adjectives comparatively using the Qualia structure and its modifications. The most commonly used 150 relative adjectives in the electronic corpora of the Russian written language were selected for analysis. They are compared with Lithuanian and German examples. Relative adjectives are classified as quality structures and are considered to imply objective constitutive properties (matter and origin), formal attributes (physical parameters, colour, time, and place) and telic attributes. Other correlating linguistic units, namely, genitive constructs and composites, are also analysed describing the expected realizations of Qualia structures in the noun group.

Adjective Intensifiers in German

While the study of English intensifiers has been a topic of much empirical discussion (Bolinger 1972, Paradis 1997, Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Xiao & Tao 2007, Fuchs 2017), intensification in the German language is underexplored. The present study operationalizes variationist methods to comprehensively examine the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German by investigating how adjective intensifiers rank empirically in terms of frequency and whether their use is sensitive to the social factorsgenderandage. Results indicate that in German, amplifiers are more frequent than downtoners, boosters are more frequent than maximizers, and the gender and the age of the speaker are factors that influence their use. These findings corroborate crosslinguistic findings (Peters 1994, Broekhuis 2013, D’Arcy 2015, Fuchs 2017). Broadly speaking, the present study suggests that the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German is, in many ways, similar to what has been observed previously in other Germanic languages.*

The Aachen List of Trait Words.

In this study, we present the Aachen List of Trait Words (ALoT), including a total of 606 German adjectives with English translations, describing personality traits. The lack of ratings regarding the social desirability of traits led us to create a German trait database. Ratings of valence and social desirability were obtained from 100 participants. Statistical analyses of 99 participants indicated that valence and social desirability ratings were strongly correlated. However, there are several words showing a weak or no relationship. Furthermore, uncommon words were rated less positively (or desirable) than more common traits. Word frequency and word length were positively correlated, showing that short terms were more common than long ones. Social desirability and valence ratings are presented together with several psycholinguistic variables known to influence word processing (e.g. word length) in the ALoT. Scores for each word are provided as supplemental materials. The ALoT is intended to provide stimulus material for experiments dealing with the affective processing of German trait adjectives.

Denominal, deadjectival and deverbal adjectives in Slovak and German

Denominal, deadjectival and deverbal adjectives in Slovak and German

Compounding in German and English

Abstract German is well-known for its propensity for nominal compounding. This claim is put on a firmer empirical footing by means of a bidirectional translation study between German and English. The difference between the two languages crystallizes in the competition between compounds and phrases. Two complementary asymmetries emerge: first, German compounds are more frequently translated by English phrases than English compounds by German phrases; second, English phrases are more frequently translated by German compounds than German phrases by English compounds. An extension to other word classes shows that the compounding bias in German is not restricted to nouns. It is tentatively argued that the token frequency of word classes plays a role in the emergence of compound propensity. The heavier use of nouns and adjectives in German than in English might be partly responsible for the higher rate of nominal and adjectival compounding in the former than the latter language.

Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form Area

Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase). As evident from a Word Type × Case Format interaction, activation in the VWFA was greater to words presented in unfamiliar case formats relative to familiar case formats. Our results suggest that neural representations of written words in the VWFA are not fully abstract and still contain information about the visual format in which words are most frequently perceived.

The time-course of morphosyntactic and semantic priming in late bilinguals: A study of German adjectives

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing.

From Noun to Evaluative Adjective: Conversion or Debonding? DutchTopand Its Equivalents in German

In this study, we address the ways in which nouns can give rise to new adjectives in Dutch and German. More specifically, the focus is on words with an evaluative meaning that can be used in a wide range of morphological and syntactic constructions in recent (and informal) language. For example, the German nounHammer‘hammer’ can be used inHammervorstellung‘very good performance’ orhammer film‘fantastic film’. In the literature, two distinct hypotheses can be found to account for the adjectival uses of such evaluative nouns. The debonding hypothesis states that the intensifying bound morpheme has developed into a free morpheme. The conversion hypothesis suggests that the new adjectival uses are the result of a syntactic reanalysis of an N as an A that takes place in the predicative position. In our case study, we analyze the synchronic bound and free uses of Dutchtop, and we compare them with Germantopandspitze. We conclude that the emergence of the adjectival uses of these morphemes points toward an interaction between both processes involved, conversion and debonding.

Schwache und starke Adjektivflexion im Deutschen: Kognitive Hintergründe

Inflection is a syntactic phenomenon found in number of natural languages. The phenomenon has been the subject of detailed typological and structural descriptions. Thus, there is a tremendous amount of research findings on this issue and a series of inflectional features has been well investigated: e.g. tense morphology in indicating temporal interrelations in an utterance; case morphology in making precision about who does what to whom; and number morphology showing the plural or singular of the entity talked about. However, the function of some inflectional features is still unclear. An example of such features are the weak and the strong declension of the German adjectives (Example: alle neuen Bücher vs. viele neue Bücher). In order to address this issue, a sample of 187 native speakers of German was included in the investigation described in the present article. The participants were administered a task that involved them deciding which grammatical number they would expect when they encountered determiners like viele, einige, sämtliche, alle during reading. The results suggest that the weak and the strong declension are psycholinguistically indispensable in the German language. Different implications are discussed.

Bewertung durch Adjektive. Ansätze einer korpusgestützten Untersuchung zur Synonymie

This paper discusses issues of lexical synonymy. Two German adjectives with the core meaning ›very good‹ are in focus: vorzuglich and vortrefflich. Our empirical data is taken from the Leipzig Corpora Collection. According to the »classical« view, near-synonyms differ from each other semantically. Hence the aim of synonym analysis is to arrive at definitions by finding out distinctive semantic features. We show that near-synonyms can possess individual combinatorial properties without clear semantic distinctions. Combinatorial preferences or restrictions often go back to usage based co-occurrences. The semantic class of co-occurrence partners is also an important factor. Furthermore, combinatorial preferences can go back to affinity with certain thematic domains, discursive practices, stylistic registers etc.

A Comparison of the Meanings of Taste adjectives in Korean and German

A Comparison of the Meanings of Taste adjectives in Korean and German

Perilaku Adjektiva terhadap Nomina dalam Frasa dan Klausa Bahasa Jerman dan Bahasa Indonesia

This research, which has been carried out in the frame of contrastive linguistics and universal grammar, focuses on the distribution of adjectives upon noun in the phrases and clauses in German and Indonesian. The objects of the research are to describe and compare the distribution of adjectives as well as their implication upon their forms. The data was obtained from German literary works such as romance books and novels, German grammar books, and various kinds of newspapers i.e. Suddeutsche Zeitung, KOMPAS and regional West Java Pikiran Rakyat daily. The results show the contrasts between those found in German and in Indonesian. In the order of phrasal elements, adjectives in German are located to the left of the nouns which serve as their boundary and the determinants are located to the left of the adjectives. In Indonesian attributive adjectives are located to the right of the nouns whereas determinants are located to the right of the adjectives. Further, in clauses, adjectives in German are connected to copulative verbs that state opinions to form predicates. In this case, adjectives require the existence of other elements as their sub-systems and potentially dominate the morphological forms of those other elements. In Indonesian, adjectives can occupy the slot where the predicates should be, which is to the right of the subjects.

Rated pleasantness and relevance of Brazilian-Portuguese adjectives for future assessment instruments.

In the present study we present Brazilian normative ratings of pleasantness and relevance for a sample of German adjectives, with the aim of contributing to the development of psychosocial and neuropsychological instruments, among other related fields. Three judges validated a preliminary list of 186 German adjectives translated to Brazilian Portuguese. A coefficient of content validity (CCV) was obtained to evaluate the degree of agreement among the judges in two dimensions: equivalence and clearness. The final list contained 136 items. The CCV for the aggregate of the 136 adjectives was .90 for equivalence and .91 for clearness. These adjectives were subsequently rated for pleasantness and relevance by 385 Brazilian participants aged 17 to 68 years. The Brazilian ratings were compatible with the original German ratings. Agreement frequency was 73-99% for pleasantness and 44-96% for relevance. These norms may be useful for both national and cross-cultural studies between Germany and Brazil and can be used in a wide range of fields including social cognition, cognitive psychology, and clinical neuropsychology. Importantly, items from this list of adjectives can be used to develop instruments to assess memory, language, and mental representations, among other cognitive processes.

Coherence with adjectives in German

Coherence generally refers to a kind of predicate formation where a verb forms a complex predicate with the head of its infinitival complement. Adjectives taking infinitival complements have also been shown to allow coherence, but the exact conditions for coherence with adjectives appear not to have been addressed in the literature. Based on a corpus-study (supplemented with grammaticality judgements by native speakers) we show that adjectives fall into three semantically and syntactically defined classes correlating with their ability to construct coherently. Non-factive and non-gradable adjectives allow coherence, factive and gradable adjectives do not allow coherence and non-factive and gradable adjectives are tolerated with coherence. On the basis of previous work on coherence in German we argue that coherence allows the infinitival complement of a verb or an adjective to be "split-up", so that the head and a dependent of this head are associated with different information structural functions. In this respect coherence patterns with extraction structures where the extracted constituent has an information structural function different from the constituent from which it is extracted. Following literature on the information structural basis of extraction islands, we show how the lack of coherence with factive adjectives follows from their complements' being information structurally backgrounded, while the infinitival complements of non-factive adjectives tend to a higher fusion with the matrix clause. We also show that coherence is observed with attributive adjectives as well, arguing that coherence is not a distinct verbal property. Finally we provide an analysis of coherence with adjectives within HPSG.